OpenLogic Backs CentOS Linux on Azure With SLA

Will Linux on Azure ever have a seat at the open source community picnik? Image: John Vetterli/Flickr

OpenLogic announced on Thursday that it will provide CentOS Linux — and service-level agreement (SLA) support — through Microsoft’s new Windows Azure gallery.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced support for Linux instances on its cloud service, among other cloud news, in what Wired Enterprise’s Cade Metz dubbed an Amazonian facelift.

CentOS says its Linux distribution, derived from the publicly available source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is enterprise grade. OpenLogic provides SLA support on CentOS through a developer crowd-sourcing program called the OpenLogic Expert Community.

The company said it retains leading open source developers for commercial-grade support “for more than 600 open source projects, including Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, JBoss, Hibernate, and ActiveMQ.” It offers one-number support to resolve any issues. “OpenLogic’s technical support staff handles questions on hundreds of open source software packages and serves as the front-line experts for enterprise support,” the company said.

Microsoft’s Helene Love Snell said in a statement: “OpenLogic has supported CentOS for several years, and we look forward to making their expertise and SLA support available to customers through the Windows Azure Marketplace.”

OpenLogic’s Steven Grandchamp writes in a blog post that for “enterprise developers and IT folks who are multi-source and multi-platform, today’s announcement is good news. The Windows and Linux worlds take one step towards each other.”

However, Grandchamp notes that despite Microsoft “maturing its views on open source” with “significant work” with Node.js, Hadoop, and Samba, the open source community “will meet [Linux on Azure] with overall wariness and skepticism.” (See related: Windows Azure: Misunderstood or Misguided?)

“Some will view this with hope and a positive step; others will continue to be cynical,” he writes. “For me, it’s part of a larger overall process that continues to signal open source coming of age. What major vendor doesn’t have an open source story now? It’s such an ingrained part of development, from legacy to mobile to cloud, that we can’t live without and we are figuring out how to love living with it.”

Have your say: What will hold folks back given enterprise-grade SLA-support for Linux on Azure, if anything? Is Grandchamp right that the open source community will turn its nose at Azure still?